1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus, an image processing method, and a storage medium thereof.
2. Related Art
For example, Japanese Patent Application No. 2006-121416 discloses a technique of carrying out a whitening process on a face area in a digital image obtained by capturing an image of a person in order to increase brightness of a portion to be highlighted.
An image processing method disclosed in Japanese Patent Application No. 2006-121416 carries out the whitening process by generating a bokeh image from an original image to be processed and increasing the brightness of a portion to be highlighted using this bokeh image.
It is often the case that, when capturing a picture of a person, illumination in the room and flash light emission at the time of photographing are overlapped with the person's face due to sebum on a skin of the face, and unnatural gloss is thus produced in the image that has been captured. Such unnatural gloss is called as “shine”. According to the image processing method disclosed in Japanese Patent Application No. 2006-121416, when a shine component is included in a facial image to be processed, an area of the shine component is expanded by the whitening process, and therefore it is not possible to reduce the shine.